


two salt shakers, two peanut butters, two mustards

by theparadigmshifts



Category: IT (Movies - Muschietti), IT - Stephen King
Genre: Alternate Universe, F/M, Fix-It of Sorts, Grief/Mourning, M/M, anyway this is why my twitter url is twomustards, at the end, i do not know. how to tag this, i posted this on tumblr originally and i am finally putting it here, patty and richie brotp
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-09
Updated: 2020-05-09
Packaged: 2021-03-03 01:34:59
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,303
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24096658
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/theparadigmshifts/pseuds/theparadigmshifts
Summary: In another world, Stan dies. Eddie does, too. In another world, Richie goes to Atlanta and stays.
Relationships: Eddie Kaspbrak/Richie Tozier, Patricia Blum Uris/Stanley Uris
Comments: 29
Kudos: 204





	two salt shakers, two peanut butters, two mustards

Richie gets on the plane somehow, after. He packs up his things, and he goes to the bridge. He says goodbye as best as he can. It's like someone else is moving one foot in front of the other, piloting his body for him. 

Richie gets back to LA in a haze to find Stan’s letter waiting for him. He turns over the envelope and sees the return address in neat handwriting in the corner, letters all curved at the edges. It's more familiar to him than his own apartment. He knows that if he stays alone with his grief it is going to kill him, so he takes the same suitcase he walked in with, goes to the airport, and gets on a plane to Atlanta.

Mrs. Blum opens the door. The house is full of mourners, brimming with the life that Stan had built for himself. Richie doesn't talk to any of them. He finds Patty in the backyard, looking out into the trees. He sits down next to her, folds his hands together between his legs, clutching so tightly he thinks he'll break the bones there. They’ve both forgotten how to speak, but when he finally turns to look at her, and she looks back at him, he croaks out, “I'm Richie.”

"Oh," she says. "Hi, Richie." The silence settles into something solid and tangible. Two ropes tied up together in a tight, snarled knot. A bond, maybe. A vow. 

Patty’s family leaves, one by one. Richie stays.

* * *

When their nightmares wake them both, they find each other in the kitchen. Patty makes tea, just to have something to do with her hands, try to stop the way they shake. She screws her eyes shut and forces herself to breathe.

"I don’t understand how to keep living,” she says to the stove. 

"Hey," she hears Richie say from behind her. "Neither do I."

The kettle shrieks its way to a boil. Patty turns, handing him a cup of tea. He takes it. Neither of them says _maybe we can figure it out together,_ but it doesn't matter. They’re both thinking it.

* * *

They talk about Stan. No one else understands that Patty still wants to. She's desperate for someone who won't skirt around him, for someone who doesn't want to forget what happened. She’s bursting with love for him, still, and she’s got nowhere to put it. So she talks, and talks, and talks, and talks, and Richie listens. She fills Richie in on the last twenty-three years, and he tells her about the first eighteen. They make each other laugh with it. They stitch together a whole life between the two of them.

After two and a half months, Patty nudges him on the patio, makes him look her in the eyes before she speaks. 

"Why are you still here, Richie?" she says. She watches his jaw flex. 

"I know," he says. "I'm sorry, I can leave." 

She shakes her head. "That isn't what I meant," she says. "That isn't what I'm asking."

He breaks down into ugly, heaving sobs, pushing one big hand behind his glasses. His shoulders shake with it. Patty cups her hand over his knee, squeezing it softly until he quiets, until his breath stops coming in sharp little gasps. And because she's heard his name called out in the middle of the night, heard Richie's voice hesitate and break around it when he tells her stories about Stan, Patty says, "tell me about Eddie." 

So Richie does. It’s like a dam breaking. He talks until the sun sets, until the porch lights kick on and the mosquitoes hover around them. He tells her everything he never got to tell Eddie, every confession he wishes he'd had the chance to make. “I think he was it for me, Patty,” Richie says. “I don't think I'm ever going to love anyone else the way I loved him.“

“No," says Patty. "Neither will I."

“You were in love with Eddie, too?” Richie says, and it’s not funny. She laughs anyway, around her tears.

* * *

They're right. They don’t ever love anyone like that again. 

But they keep each other going. They tether each other. It's not the same, Richie thinks, to lose someone you never had. To mourn a love that never lived instead of a love that died. But when Richie calls himself "gay" out loud for the first time, Patty tells him she's proud of him, and Richie believes it enough to be proud of himself, too. When Patty tries to take a shower but breaks down in the bathroom, sitting on the toilet seat with her towel wrapped tightly around her, Richie turns off the water and holds her until she can speak again.

Patty starts painting again. Sometimes when she hears feet shuffling on the floor behind her she expects them to be a little quieter. She expects a call through the house and a kiss on her forehead, arms sliding around her and a chin resting in the dip where her neck meets her shoulder. When she turns around, Richie can see everything in her shattered expression.

“I’m sorry," he says. "It’s just me.”

“No,” she says. “I'm glad it's you. I'm glad you’re here.”

Patty pushes Richie to start writing again. He’s never going to get up on a stage again, and everything comes out twisted instead of funny, but when she reads it, she laughs the way she used to, before. "You can do something with this, Rich," she says.

"Yeah?"

"Yeah. The fuckups are gonna love it.”

* * *

They’re out on the porch again a year later, on the anniversary of Stan's death. It’s been a bad day for both of them - a quiet day. Richie brings her gin in a coffee mug and sits down beside her, barefoot on the concrete. She looks at him for a long time before she speaks again.

“Eddie loved you back, you know,” she says. “Even if he never got the chance to say it.”

Richie’s jaw works, and he shakes his head. “You don’t know that.”

“Yes, I do,” Patty says.

“How?” Richie asks, voice trembling.

“Because you’re easy to love,” Patty says, simply.

He draws her in, presses a kiss to her forehead, and cries into her hair. They’re two salt shakers, she thinks, two peanut butters, two mustards. But that just means they’re made of the same thing.

* * *

But that’s what happened in some other world.

In this one, the Uris house is hectic with life, adopted and biological children shrieking as they run through the kitchen to the backyard. Eddie scrunches up his nose as the youngest rubs her sticky hands along the crease of his khakis, tries to wipe her clean as she crawls into his lap. Richie whispers in another’s ear and nods wickedly with her, planning something that will be a nightmare to clean up later. There's a wedding ring on his finger, a gold band that glints in the sun with Patty's. She's all in yellow today, shining like the sun, and Stan's in a checked button up, maroon and white. _Ketchup and mustard_ , Patty had said to him that morning. Richie pulls the girl's hair into a goofy, too-high ponytail, watches his husband wrap his hands hesitantly around the baby's waist, making sure she doesn't fall. 

"Do _no_ _t_ listen to your uncle, Rachel!" Stan shouts from the porch. She settles into her mother’s lap instead, and when Patty and Richie meet each other's eyes, they can see into that other world, just for a second. Ten more minutes in the bathroom. Six inches to the right.

 _We almost lost this. We almost lost them_ , one of them thinks.

 _Yes, but we didn’t_ , thinks the other. _We have them._

_And each other?_

_Yeah. And each other._

**Author's Note:**

> originally posted on tumblr back in January [here](https://theparadigmshifts.tumblr.com/post/190024065718/richie-gets-back-to-la-in-a-haze-to-find-stans)
> 
> find me on tumblr @ [theparadigmshifts](https://theparadigmshifts.tumblr.com/) or on twitter @ [twomustards](https://twitter.com/twomustards/)


End file.
